This is a guide for myself for when I set up a new system (or bork the one I have)
Step 1.
What distro to choose?
Debian (stable for work, upgrade to testing at home or if in dependancy hell): https://www.debian.org/distrib/
Arch was nice to run because of the rolling releases, but sadly not viable due to some proprietary software necessary for work that doesn't support it.
Desktop environment:
GNOME if I don't feel like customizing or KDE Plasma if I want to get everything just right. It's nice to have a desktop environment when you have to deal with Teams, screensharing and other things that don't play well with a tiling window manager. Need to install dconf-cli in order to import gnome settings. Use dconf load < gnome-settings.ini and the settings should be loaded.
Install Gnome Tweaks to tweak gnome.
Installing dotfiles and packages: GNU stow is used to manage dotfiles and allow for easy redeployment of a system. In addition a list of packages is available in the repo in order to easily reinstall all the packages. in order to install the packages use 'sudo dpkg --set-selections < ~/package-list.txt' and 'sudo apt install dselect-upgrade' and the packages should be installed. This may not work correctly, so just look at the list of packages and get the most essential ones manually. Stow might also not work. In that case, just copy over the config files to the correct directories. In addition, lazyvim, lazygit, vscode, discord and vmware need to be installed manually.
TODO: Test the setup.
TODO: Look further into streamlining this process more, so it's easier when setting up a new system. Got a bit of the way there with the setup and stow scripts. But this needs to be tested. Is there anything else that can be automated?
TODO: Describe the setup and stow-scripts. What they do, how they work and how to use them.
TODO: Consider switching to chezmoi
TODO: Setup the QMK vim keybinds correctly.
Tiling window manager for max productivity:
Easy alternative: Use Mutter that's built-in to Gnome. Customize it with Gnome Tweaks and use gnome-shell-extension-auto-move-windows to move applications to workspaces.
Awesome: https://awesomewm.org/
Themes for awesome: https://github.com/Relz/awesome-wm-theme and https://github.com/lcpz/awesome-copycats
Previously ran i3. This required a lot of configuring and tinkering. Awesome on the other hand runs out of the box and feels easier to deal with.
Locking the screen: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1070657/awesome-wm-how-do-you-set-a-hotkey-to-lock-your-system
Text editor/IDE:
VScode (with vim motions): Nice to have when you don't feel like being a keyboard wizard, need to pair program with a colleague or you've borked your Neovim doing something stupid.
Neovim:
Lazyvim (because I'm lazy): https://www.lazyvim.org/
Dependencies:
Nerdfonts: https://www.nerdfonts.com/
Luajit: http://luajit.org/
Kitty terminal: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
Kitty themes: https://github.com/dexpota/kitty-themes
CLI tools:
GNU Stow: https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
Lazygit: https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit
What-cmd: https://github.com/OpusMag/what-cmd
Thefuck: https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck
Zoxide: https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide
Tldr: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr
Exa: https://github.com/ogham/exa
Bat: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
Fzf: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
Procs: https://github.com/dalance/procs
Now there are a thousand small steps inbetween these big ones and a lot of dependencies not mentioned, but they'll become apparant when walking through the steps. At this point, replacing the config files with the ones in this repo is the last step. After that, the system should be pretty much ready to go.